In the age of digital photography old techniques like wet plate photography seems somewhat exotic and archaic. I guess wet plate photography is challenging even with moderate sized plates, not to mention the large plates Ian Ruhter is working with. You will find more examples of his work on the website ianruhter.tumblr.com
It feels like the autumn is almost over already and the gray transition from autumn to winter is just around the corner. There are still a few trees dressed in autumn colors, but as you venture away from the urban areas bare branches dominate the scene and the ground is strewn with more or less colorful leaves.
I set out to take some pictures of trees covered in veils of colorful leaves, but it turns out that it was at least a week too late. Wind and hard rain over the past week have stripped most trees bare. But I came across a patch of straws near the shore of a small lake. So I shot a few frames, and with a little post processing I think this one worked out quite well. Hope you enjoy it.
Water and electronics does not strike me as a perfect combination, but the artist Antoin Fourneau and Digitalarti Artlab has made a LED panel where the LEDs light up when water is sprayed on the panel. Read more about it at the thecreatorsproject blog in their blog entry "Water Light Graffiti Lets Users Create LED Art With A Water Gun" (The video is posted on Vimeo by Digitalarti.)
I tend to be more content with simple motifs, or scenes where I can reduce the subject to its bare essential, than by complex scenes where there is a lot going on. This image of a few straws is an example of such an image. I have converted it to a black and white image and applied some toning; the original colors where kind of gray-ish and did not convey the mood of the scene the way I wanted.
This picture is shot on slide film almost a decade ago. It is slightly underexposed, but a little post processing turned it into a decent B&W.
Original shot with an A1 loaded with Fujichrome Sensia, scanned and converted to B&W.
There is just something about this video, "Honey Harvest" by Kinfolk, posted on Vimeo. I really like the way they have used the low contrast imagery to give the shadow areas a slightly washed out quality - like a faded summer memory.
Along the many fjords of Norway you will find traces of human activity, be it small communities or an isolated farm like in this picture. This picture is taken from the ferry which runs along the Geiranger fjord, from Hellesylt to Geiranger. The mountains lining the fjord to the north and south are steep and up to 1200 to 1400 meters tall. (4000 - 4500 feet) The landscape is picturesque and dramatic to say the least.
The nights are getting cooler and we have had the first nights with sub zero temperatures (below 32F). The first sheet of ice is very thin, and even a slight breeze will shift the ice around if there is even a small patch of open water. The result can be patterns like these.
Spending the summer at the coast is always refreshing. Here is my little attempt at a soundscape, a little scene from the waterfront - a teleport back to summer, sunshine and lazy days ...
This soundscape is put together of a number of short pieces of sound I recorded at the waterfront - seagulls, waves washing on the rocks and so forth. The bumblebee I got on tape purely by chance a few days later - it flew by my microphone and decided to take a closer look; the challenge was to isolate it from the lawnmower in the background.
Unfortunately there was an error in the link to the RSS link, "Follow", for my blog. So if you clicked the "Follow" link on September 18th or 19th, I recommend that you delete the old RSS feed and register again.
What happened was that the link was not updated when I registered the mortensalomonsen.com domain, so for a day or so the link pointed to the domain name I used for setting up the site. The old RSS-link is still valid, but I am not sure for how long.
On the way home from work I saw the mirror image of the old main building of the national weather service, met.no, in the windows of their new building, "TallHall" at Blindern. The next day I brought my camera and tried to get a shot of the scene. It did not work out exactly as I had hoped, but it is close enough. I'll try again, the architecture of the new building is quite exiting.
The history of the Norwegian national weather service, met.no, runs back 150 years. The main office has been at Blindern in Oslo since the mid forties when the main building was built. Blindern was a rural area back then, but today it is part of the town and the main location for the University of Oslo.
The first university buildings where built around the same time, and are built in a style of architecture inspired by functionalism, as for example the Pharmacy building. The architecture of me.no's old building may also be inspired by the functionalist movement.
